Idan Landau says what the Israeli military is actually doing in northern Gaza “is even more appalling” than the ethnic-cleansing plan outlined by a group of retired generals.
Free Palestine Die-In at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Dec. 5, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Much alarm has been raised over the so-called Generals’ Plan, an ethnic cleansing proposal for northern Gaza that has reportedly garnered attention in the highest reaches of the Israeli government.
But Israeli scholar Idan Landau argued in a column published in English by +972 Magazine on Friday that what the Israeli military is actually doing in northern Gaza “is even more appalling” than the plan outlined by a group of retired generals.
Landau argued that focus on the details of the Generals’ Plan has served to obscure the “true brutality” of Israel’s deadly operations in northern Gaza, which has been rendered a hellscape of death and destruction by the military assault and siege.
Landau, a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, opened his column — first published in Hebrew on his blog — by pointing to two photos: one showing a celebratory event at a camp built by an Israeli settler organization just outside of the Gaza Strip, and the other showing displaced Palestinians lined up at gunpoint amid the ruins of northern Gaza.
“These photos tell a story that is unfolding so rapidly that its harrowing details are already on the brink of being forgotten,” wrote Landau.
“Yet this story could start from any point during the past 76 years: the Nakba of 1948, the ‘Siyag Plan‘ that followed it, the Naksa of 1967. On one side, displaced Palestinians with all the belongings they can carry, hungry, wounded, and exhausted; on the other, joyful Jewish settlers, sanctifying the new land that the army has cleared for them.”
The Israeli military’s dehumanization of the people of Gaza, Landau wrote, “cannot help but trigger our associations with scenes depicting the Nazis loading Jews into cattle cars.”
Landau wrote that what the Israeli army has been implementing in northern Gaza in recent weeks is “not quite” the Generals’ Plan, which entails giving Palestinians still in the region a week to leave before declaring the area a closed military zone — and designating everyone who remains a militant who can be denied humanitarian assistance and killed.
The actual strategy Israeli soldiers have been deploying in northern Gaza is “an even more sinister and brutal version” of the Generals’ Plan “within a more concentrated area.”
“The Israeli military’s dehumanization of the people of Gaza, Landau wrote, ‘cannot help but trigger our associations with scenes depicting the Nazis loading Jews into cattle cars.’ “
“The first, most immediate distinction is the abandoning of provisions for reducing harm to civilians, i.e. giving residents of northern Gaza a week to evacuate southward,” Landau wrote. “The second departure concerns the real purpose of emptying the area: while portraying the military operation as a security necessity, it was, in fact, an embodiment of the spirit of ethnic cleansing and resettlement from day one.”
“As opposed to the picture painted by the army, implying that residents in the northern areas were free to move south and get out of the danger zone, local testimonies presented a frightening reality: Anyone who so much as stepped out of their home risked being shot by Israeli snipers or drones, including young children and those holding white flags,” Landau noted. “Rescue crews trying to help the wounded also came under attack, as well as journalists trying to document the events.”
The scholar cites one “particularly harrowing video” in which a Palestinian child is seen “on the ground pleading for help after being wounded by an airstrike; when a crowd gathers to help him, they are suddenly hit by another airstrike, killing one and wounding more than 20 others.”
“This is the reality amid which the people of northern Gaza were supposed to walk, starved and exhausted, into the ‘humanitarian zone,” Landau wrote.
“Since the Israeli army began its operation in northern Gaza, it has killed over 1,000 Palestinians. The Israeli Air Force usually bombs at night while the victims are sleeping, slaughtering entire families in their homes and making it more difficult to evacuate the wounded. And on Oct. 24, rescue services announced that the intensity of the bombardment left them with no choice but to cease all operations in the besieged areas.”
The deadly military assault, Landau stressed, has been accompanied by a “starvation policy” that has severely hindered the flow of humanitarian assistance to northern Gaza.
The heads of prominent United Nations agencies and human rights organizations warned Friday that conditions on the ground in the region are “apocalyptic” and that “the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence.”
Landau noted that on Oct. 16, following pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government reportedly allowed 100 aid trucks to enter northern Gaza.
“The deadly military assault, Landau stressed, has been accompanied by a ‘starvation policy’ that has severely hindered the flow of humanitarian assistance to northern Gaza.”
“But journalists in the north were quick to correct the record: Nothing at all had entered the besieged areas,” Landau wrote. “On October 20, Israel denied a further request by U.N. agencies to bring in food, fuel, blood, [and] medicines. Three days later, in response to a request for an interim order by the Israeli human rights group Gisha, the state admitted to the High Court that no humanitarian aid had been allowed into northern Gaza up to that point. By this time, we are already talking about a three-week-long food siege.”
Addressing the question of “what is left for us to do” in the face of such a catastrophe, Landau wrote that “the consensus concerning the war of extermination poisons Israeli society and blackens its future so profoundly that even small pockets of resistance can proliferate stamina and hope to those who have not yet been carried away by the currents of madness.”
“We can also look for partners in this fight abroad, where the critical lever of pressure is the pipeline of American weapons,” he added.
“The struggle to end this intensifying war of extermination and transfer in Gaza, particularly in the north, is first and foremost a human fight. It is a fight for life, both in Gaza and Israel: for the very chance that life can continue to exist in this blood-soaked land. Nothing could be more patriotic.”
+972 Magazine published Landau’s column a day after Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, warned in a statement that “time is running out” to stop the far-right Israeli government’s attempt to “erase the Palestinians from their own land and allow Israel to fully annex Palestinian territory.”
“Genocide and a man-made humanitarian catastrophe are unfolding in front of us and in Gaza,” said Albanese. “I regret to see so many member states are avoiding acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people and instead look away.”
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Israel is going to pay a huge price for this barbarity, it’s just a question of how and when.
Mankind has surely taken a step back in the world today. Who would have thought that in the 21st century that we would see a repeat of hitlers regime in a so called civilised world.
I’ve come to view this genocide as a continuation of the same genocidal system of removing indigenous people to make their land profitable for the invaders/occupiers that has gone on for centuries. This holds true for Ukraine as well. This is the end game of capitalist control of the planet. As we are witnessing, these insane ghouls will stop at nothing to take it all and leave nothing. They are not moved by pleas to conscience. They don’t know what that even means. We had best teach them that humanity will not tolerate being exterminated for profit and we better figure out how to do that now. Later doesn’t exist.
What Israel is doing is worse than the announced plan.
Everyone now look ‘surprised!’ Lets see your surprise face. Cmon, just like at the birthday party you knew about in advance … surprise!
This of course is the standard story for everything that ‘the west’ has done for decades. What the PR flaks say is always not in accord with reality, and reality is always worse than they told you it would be when they were lying to you to get your votes in an election.
So, lets see those ‘surprise faces’. Besides, you’ll need the practice. You are certain to need to look ‘surprised’ after Tuesday, no matter who you voted for, because, wait for it, the reality will be worse. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
I posted this comment on Caitlin Johnstone’s “Too Much Evidence” post a few days ago. Worth doing again.
As a U.S. Army medic, my uncle was one of the first Americans into the Dachau concentration camp. It had been the so-called model camp, internationally inspected in the ’30s. What my uncle saw there was so horrific he could not talk about it. In the late ’90s, my stepfather was in the hospital dying at a very old age and he had become skin and bones. At that point, my uncle could no longer bear to visit because it triggered what he’d witnessed 55 years earlier.
When the Holocaust deniers made headlines a couple of decades ago, I tried to get my uncle to write down what he saw for the historical archives. He attempted to several times, but just couldn’t. Instant intolerable PTSD.
If the horror of suffering, starving, ill people was so bad to an outsider, what must it have been like for the people who lived through it for years? How then can their Zionist descendants ever do the same to others?!
“Never again” is not proprietary for one group exclusively–it is a most basic of universal human rights.
I cannot begin to comprehend how the creatures responsible for this ongoing genocide are capable of such horrific evil
Indeed, how can the U.S. continue to turn a blind eye to our complicity in this horror? The systematic slaughter of a people hardly gets mentioned in the runup to the farcical election, where we get to choose who will continue with this genocide. A society that can tolerate this unspeakable lack of humanity is a society with no moral compass, despite our claim to being the “indispensable” nation.
“Not in my name” has the U.S. ever been the “indispensable” nation, but then, I have cosmopolitan tendencies, and believe in multilateralism rather than a unipolar hegemony.
I rather suspect that nations that claim to be ‘indispensable’ often lack a moral compass. It tends to go along with the grandiose megalomania that makes one feel so indispensable in the first place.
On the other hand, nations with a functioning moral compass are probably far more likely to just be willing to get along with their neighbors and live in peace and not be telling everyone what to do because they are feeling so friggin indispensable.
Yes, how is the US such a morally bankrupt place? Virtually all voters will choose a candidate committed to continuing the genocide (and the useless slaughter in Ukraine, the continued destruction of the environment and climate stability without which humanity can’t survive, the maintenance of the largest prison population in the world, the continued increase in homelessness are poverty in the midst of immense wealth, the interference with sovereign governments around the world, the attacks on immigrants, the police killings of people of color, etc.) Morals are an endangered species here, on the verge of extinction in fact.
Nor how “our” governments support it, because that’s what they are doing. We will never forgive them.